5 Lessons From ‘Sex And The City’ We All Need To Unlearn

I may be dating myself, but when the original series of Sex and the City was airing on HBO, I was smack in the middle of my formative teen years.

Of course, like literally everyone at the time, I was glued to my TV every week to see what shenanigans Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha were getting up to. There were plenty of good lessons to learn from the show, especially when it comes to sex positivity. But that’s not what we’re talking about today. There were some lessons from Sex and the City that should be avoided at all costs.

Writers make mad bank.

Carrie Bradshaw manages to afford a lot just by writing a weekly sex column for the newspaper. She’s got a beautiful apartment in a walk-up in Manhattan, and, most perplexing of all, a closet full of designer clothes and shoes. She’s having daily brunches with the girls and spends her nights drinking in expensive clubs and bars. I’m sorry to say, but this is a total fantasy. Unless she had a trust fund we didn’t know about, there’s no way she was affording any of that on a writer’s salary. (Which is honestly a shame.)

I should be able to run around the city in heels.

The ladies of Sex and the City were always wearing crazy high heels–especially Carrie. They’re frolicking around Manhattan as if they’re dancing on clouds. Maybe all those people who complain about heels are just exaggerating? Nope, it’s the show that’s wrong. Why designers decided to create torture devices for our feet, I’ll never know.

My life will revolve around men.

I realize that it’s called Sex and the City, but the show really did revolve around only the romances of the four main characters. Sure, we’d sometimes get a different storyline, but I honestly can’t think of a single one. Despite the show starring an almost entirely female cast, SATC really doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. Every conversation is about men. Thankfully, in real life that’s not the case. It turns out women have more to say than what their boyfriend’s dick looks like.

Something incredibly interesting will happen nearly every day.

Compared to Sex and the City, my real adult life is incredibly boring. I’m not getting broken up with via a Post-It note or moving to Paris with my Russian boyfriend. I’m not falling on runways or making my friends buy me shoes for being single. Nope, I’m just sitting here watching Love Actually for the fifteenth time and thinking about ordering a pizza for dinner. Real life is mostly low-drama and I’m cool with that.

I should pine for the unavailable guy.

The worst lesson of all comes from the biggest storyline of the show, pun intended. Carrie starts the series with Big and we learn quickly that he’s not right for her. The amount of heartache and heartbreak she gets from this one man is outrageous. He’s a commitment-phobe with major issues who treats her like shit, and yet she spends the entire series pining over him while dating or being engaged to others. Sure, they end up together in the end, but at what cost? Is a man like that really worth the trouble? Let’s all do ourselves a favor and forget about the difficult guys. Real, high-quality love feels easy.